A fuller whose job is to make the clothes shine had large grounds. He thought someone else could set up his trade there. He knew the rent would add to his profits. So he sent advertisements all around for some trader or an artisan to move in. One day a collier dropped in. He was interested. All he needed was a furnace and space for storing firewood. ‘Just let me in. I look after my needs and pay rent on the day agreed and give you no trouble’,said he.
The fuller took the collier to show his line of business. ‘See I only need sunshine and space to hang all the clothes bleached to dry out.’
The collier showed him in his turn how he worked. ‘See that chimney stack. It takes all the smoke and will not trouble you or me.’
The fuller however was not convinced. He said, ‘you shall keep your end of the bargain.I know. Unfortunately we share the same sky. I need the sun to make my clothes shine spotless and keep their whiteness. But can I trust wind or your smoke? I know you mean no harm. But the wind may blow all that smoke onto my space and undo my hard work. It is better that you go elsewhere. It will give me peace.’
The State and Religion cannot mix. There are so many imponderables and not a single state has been saved by religion. Instead Religion has only defeated every effort of best of men who would give peace to men within the state. Look at Spain under the Moors. How the Moors and Christians fought for its control? Imagine what would have been the case had the Moors still controlled Spain? It would have been another Syria under Bashar Assad or Libya. Now Spain under the Catholic Church produced Franco. With the Church interfering every horror man could think of under the sun has come one after the other: Inquisition, civil war, stolen children, forced adoption,sex abuse. For all the iron heel of church or dictatorship what is the economic situation? Unemployment is very high and Recession is very much there. If one looks where Spain (or any other nation where religion plays a vital role), it will be clear where these nations stand in terms of happiness.(OECD.org) Religion has been man’s own device to make him fall headlong into the pit of misery. Religion and State have been devil’s prescription for man’s pride that makes him think he is in control of his own destiny.
Remember Guernica? Remember Bali Bombing?
benny

“The Leadership Conference of Women Religious , a prominent group of U.S. Catholic nuns, said it was “stunned” Thursday after the Vatican issued a report essentially accusing it of neglecting its duties, according to the Washington Post.

Their offenses included spending too much time on alleviating poverty and pushing for social justice; not being outspoken enough against gay marriage and abortion; and adopting political views not fully in line with male U.S. bishops who are considered the only “authentic teachers of faith and morals” by the Vatican.

Pope Benedict XVI also reiterated and defended the dogma that has kept women from the priesthood.

Why Vatican is adamant about prohibiting women from priestly duties? Catholic scholars interpret their absence at the Biblical Last Supper as a divine mandate barring their admission. Interpretation when it is from scholars whose scholarship is for hire the Church seems to have aplenty whenever they need it. Interpretation is not based on any direct quote from Jesus. On he other hand we have this quote from Mt,18:6 ‘Whosoever shall offend one of these little ones…,it were better for him a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depths of the sea.” In the light of many crimes of sex abuse institutionalized as it were, since the Church had kept it a secret and refused to punish them strictly as justice for the victims demanded, we may take scholarship of these toadies with a pinch of salt. The Church would castrate those who complained about priests for abuse, ten of them as it happened in the Netherlands in the 50s we may be sure the motive of the Church has nothing to do with the Scriptures.(Ack: Yahoo news of April, 23,’12

benny

A viewpoint like this is sadly not surprising, but its similarity to GOP rhetoric is.

It’s laughable that people appointed to help others would be reprimanded for giving too much of their time to charitable activity and not devoting enough energy to politicking for social conservatism.

There is yet another scandal brewing concerning the Catholic Church in the Netherlands following allegations, which were published last weekend in the NRC Handelsblad newspaper.
It not only sounds ludicrous as a medical procedure, but in moral terms it’s downright barbarous: castrating young men to “cure” them of their homosexuality. Yet this was how the Roman Catholic Church in the Netherlands treated gays in the 1950s, according to the Dutch newspaper, which claims at least 10 men were forced to go under the knife at the church’s behest. The Dutch parliamentarians are now called to demand an inquiry into the issue, raising questions about whether the church received political cover to take such extreme measures.
The newspaper said the castrations were regarded both as a treatment for homosexuality as well as a punishment for those who accused clergy of sexual abuse. The newspaper said 20-year-old Henk Heithuis had been surgically castrated on the instructions of Catholic priests in 1956 after he told police he was being abused at the Harreveld boarding school in Gelderland. Although the monks were convicted of the abuse, Heithuis was nonetheless sent to a Catholic psychiatric hospital and then castrated. He died two years later in a car crash. How did that conveniently occur? The more we know of the Church the more unsavory and murkier it gets. The Dan Brown’s book pales into insignificance as we get to read of the thugs who are dressed in purple and given a tiara impose their own free will on others. These unctuous fools mouth moral primers for the followers while they practice altogether different.
I can see the opulence of the Cathedrals where monkeys in their cloth rising to give homilies to a congregation of dead. The skeletons receive sacraments by habit and go to their own ways no better than how they went in. This circus shall go on unless the State take concerted steps to treat it as a criminal organization breeding teachings detrimental to good sense and public decency. It is as virulent in their extreme view of treating human lives as trifle as much as Jihadists who coerce children to be suicide bombers are. The West for all its liberal traditions allow these elements to go with impunity taking terrible toll in perverting natural good sense and causing incalculable damage.

tailspin: The newspaper also adds there are strong indications that at least nine other young men were castrated around the same time, either for whistle-blowing or for supposed homosexuality.( Time.com – Mar 23, 2012)

There is a scandal raging in the heart of Spain and it goes back to the days of Franco.The Church have been accused of colluding with the dictator’s regime. Not surprisingly the role of Church as always have been unsavoury. First the news.“It is estimated that between 1950 and the early 80’s, 300,000 babies were taken from parents deemed “undesirable” and sold to loyalists of General Franco. This pipeline is also thought to have been orchestrated with direct aid of the Catholic Church in Spain and has left a country wondering the fate of the stolen babies.“and many women have died without learning their children’s fate. Now activists are stepping up pressure on Spain’s justice system to ease their search for answers.
— Emilia Giron never forgot her second son. She wanted to name him Jesus, but he was taken from her in the hospital to be baptized and was never returned.
He was stolen while she was imprisoned by Gen. Francisco Franco’s regime, in the early 1940s, after the country’s bitter civil war.
Giron died at 95 in 2007, five years after telling her story to historian Ricard Vinyes, who was also jailed by the Franco dictatorship. She never found out what happened to Jesus.
Her baby boy was one of thousands of children who were reportedly separated from their parents in the 1940s during a little-known chapter of the repression that followed the 1936-’39 Spanish Civil War, a practice that would have a terrible echo decades later in Argentina’s “dirty war.”
Giron’s ordeal and that of other parents were immortalized by the 2002 documentary “The Lost Children of Franco,”(Ack: Hazel Healy, Los Angeles Times, reporting from Madrid)
Under Franco’s far-right regime, she was considered morally unfit to raise a child because she was the sister of an outlawed guerrilla leader.
Military psychologist Antonio Vallejo-Nagera built the ideological framework for the practice of taking children from their parents. He saw Marxism as a form of mental illness that was polluting the Hispanic race and advocated that children of leftists be removed and re-educated, a process he termed “separating the wheat from the chaff.”( In the Central America the Church have been propagating Liberation Theology in the seventies. There they were forcing Marxist ideology on the faithfuls by perverting the teachings of Jesus. At the heart of it do you see their motives? It would seem the Church were by stealth trying to hit at the very interests of USA. Plying fast and loose with words and obfuscating clear arguments to put the opposition stymied seems Jesuitical but the Catholic theology and its apologists revel in them!)
An unknown number of infants were taken from women’s prisons. In addition, some Republican child evacuees were repatriated without their parents’ consent and interned in Social Aid homes for schooling in religious and nationalist ideology. Many were adopted by right-wing families.
A law passed in 1941 allowed the state to change the surnames of children in their care. Original records were tampered with, destroyed or simply closed to information seekers, and the victims’ past became virtually untraceable.
When Franco died in 1975, the abuses of his regime were swept under the carpet in the interest of a smooth transition to democracy. In a country still littered with unmarked mass graves, the past has remained untouchable and hugely contentious.
Unlike Argentina, Spain has had no truth commission or trials.
In 2008, Spanish Judge Balthazar Garzon catapulted the fate of the “lost children” into the public spotlight as part of a wider investigation of human rights abuses during Franco’s 37-year dictatorship. I am almost certain he must have been eased out for his courage.
Tailpiece: Consider the atrocities perpetrated in areas where the Catholic Church have authority: Italy, Ireland,Spain. Looking at each of these places unable to come out of their low economic status is it possible to make a connection between the Church and the State? What has sapped from them the spirit of enterprise and bold initiative one that you find in Germany or in the North? Spirit of the individual bled white with the obscurantist ideas,- and wherever possible his children abused and their innocence compromised, make up the citizenry. The citizen still educated has something missing out deep down. How do these individuals add to the country when they cannot even get rid of their feeling of unworthiness? What ideals can a country of such wounded and skewed mindset uphold?
Franco the dictator is still revered for his boldness and achievements. It must be the boldness of a rapist who having violated the moral purity of the nation at which some fools sing the praise of his patriotism! Personally I consider the Church guilty of crimes more foul than actual murder. There are spiritual ghouls, frocked and unctous in their tomfoolery, and yet mouthing homelies. What is more they also want to be called abbe or father!
In the way the Spanish government have turned a blind eye to these crimes against Spanish mothers reveal they are as guilty as the Church. When shall the guilty ones brought to justice?
benny